Training, without learning transfer, is arguably a waste of budget and time. So, what does training need to achieve learning transfer? How do we ensure the operationalization of what was delivered, so it becomes the new way of doing things?
Delegates take in what is delivered during a learning experience and then they must let it out to express it, to test it, to practice it and get good at it. If they do enough of this over time, it will become their default way of operating. In essence, they need to do things afterward. It’s not enough to pass an exam or to just remember for a while what was learned — and then forget it.
If delegates don’t do something with what they learned, it will die and slip away like a phantom in the mist. In the classroom, you can bring the content to life, engage people and get them excited. But, how do you keep it alive beyond the event, and long enough for it to become relevant, useful and used in a real-world scenario?
Think back to a task that you used to do one way, and now do a different way. How did that happen? For most of us, this follows fairly predictable stages. We come to realize, or someone tells us, that a task could be done a better way or the right way, and alongside that there is a desire to at least give it a go to see what happens if we do it differently.
We may need to learn something and then experiment. If that seems promising, we try it again a few times and see what results we get. We reflect on what happens, and we compare our results to what other people get. We consider the pros and cons of doing it the new way in comparison to the old way. If the change looks good, we keep doing it the new way which embeds it, and often improves it, through ongoing practice.
For many of the behavioral changes we make in our lives, much of this process is out of our conscious awareness, and yet it happens. The length of the process, the number of steps and the content of those steps will vary depending on the complexity of the behavior change, the motivation to make the change and the size of the gap between what we were doing and what we decided to do instead.
Given this process needs to happen for an employee to change their behaviour, how can we deliver this process to them? The typical L&D question is, “how do we deliver this content?” But a better question would be, “how do we deliver this behavior?”
Let’s assume we have done a behavioral needs analysis and determined the set of desired behaviors that we want to deliver. And, of course, as part of your BNA, you have defined what evidence will be visible when those behaviors are in operation. You now have your outcome defined and measurable. By the way, make sure you get that behavioural outcome and the measures signed off by the executive sponsor.
You now know the destination, and the current position. Next, you need a set of turn-by-turn instructions to guide people on their journey from the current position to the desired destination. Their journey needs to be filled with all the activities that will help them learn the new behaviours and practice them to ensure those behaviours become embedded and sustained over time.
As soon as you start talking about a sequence of activities that is designed and orchestrated over time to achieve a specific outcome, you are talking about a workflow — a sequence or series of steps to achieve a desired outcome or goal.
This is what we want. We want a repeatable sequence of activities that will guarantee someone gets from where they are to where we want them to be. But specifically in our case, the start and end points of this journey are behavioral rather than positional. To separate this kind of workflow from all the other workflows that are used in business, I use the term “learning workflow.” You might also call it a behavioral change workflow, though that does not roll off the tongue so easily.
We know from decades of research that some learners, usually only a few, do change their behavior after a learning experience — most specifically training. When you investigate, you will find that these people made some decisions and took some actions to practice and utilise what they learnt on the course. In effect, they proactively created their own learning workflow, which is why they were successful in changing their behavior.
If you want the majority of learners to change their behavior, your L&D team will need to design and provide a learning workflow that guides them through the steps they need to take to complete their journey. In my experience, learning workflows work far more effectively when there are many small activities rather than a few bigger activities. This has implications when you seek to scale this across dozens or hundreds of learners, even for a relatively simple set of behavioral outcomes.
When you start considering all the activities that, for example, a new manager needs to do to embed all the new behaviors they will need to be effective as a manager, it becomes obvious you will need some digital help in the form of a learning workflow platform. An LWP can deliver your activities, track their completion, involve other stakeholders and apply behavioural measures. Since most of these workflow activities are not consuming learning content, a typical learning system won’t do what is needed.In summary, we need learning transfer to follow a learning intervention if the learning is to have any impact. Learning transfer is dependent on behavior change and generating reliable behavior change is dependent on using a learning workflow. Therefore, you need a learning workflow wrapped around your training to achieve learning transfer and business impact. Hence, this article’s title: Learning transfer requires a learning workflow solution.
